He's not a US citizen. In the 1990s he was convicted of some computer crimes in Australia (where he is from) but he served his time.
When this started there were accusations of rape, which is a crime most of the world is willing to extradite for. To rape someone you actually need to be there. But now there are charges for what, and where was he?
If he were a US citizen being charged for violating US law while abroad, I could understand the extradition. But here, he's an Australian citizen being extradited for so far unspecified crimes committed against a country he apparently wasn't in and isn't a citizen of.
Imagine if the US turned over to China everybody who spoke ill of the Chinese government, or shipped off to North Korea the people who released documents that North Korea deemed offensive. Unless there are some other charges, that's what I see as the equivalent. From what I've read, his only ties to the US are that he offended politicians there, and published documents the government (which was a foreign government for him) didn't want published.
Not all game developers are game programmers. Artists, animators, designers, audio engineers, they're all game developers, too. Many statistics that talk about game developers could be better broken out by discipline. Programmers are the highest paid of all the game development disciplines, and at senior levels they're comparable to other fields. I don't mean the trend of "senior" being applied to someone with three years experience, I'm referring to people with a decade or more of work experience working at established companies.
At the junior levels --- where there is more supply than demand and many young eager applicants are willing to work for exploitative companies --- programmers are often paid less than similar industries. There are many bad companies who churn-and-burn. This means a large number of junior developers have bad experiences because those abusive companies churn through so many.
At senior levels --- where demand is greater than supply and workers are generally savvy enough to not be exploited by the abusive companies --- pay rates are good. They're not investment banker or well funded Internet Startup good, but on par with programmers in many other industries.
The good companies that pay well also tend to grow slowly and have low turnover, meaning people are secure in their higher paying jobs, but the openings are less common (because of the low turnover) so they are less visible.
The "six figures" comments others are making are location specific and misleading. $100K in Silicon Valley is not a living wage. $100K in Des Moines is high. £100K in Yorkshire is an amazing rate.
It all depends on the context.
In the context of something that does no harm to anyone, those can be fun pranks.
But as the story points out, sometimes there is unintended harm.
It is potentially a major issue when these "undocumented features" show up elsewhere. There were several fun "undocumented features" like the excel flight simulator, and the names of volcanoes in the Microsoft screen saver. But for some organizations, like military organizations that rely on the software, undocumented features are a security nightmare.
TL;DR: Funny animation on home computer is good. Funny animation on hospital emergency room computer or nuclear submarine control system is bad. The computer doesn't know the difference.
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
"Nobody really thought about it" really means you didn't think about it.
Lots of people thought about it. During the Browser Wars of Netscape v Microsoft starting in late 1995, control over who owns the future was discussed all the time. Companies spent untold billion dollars fighting for that control. Microsoft spent several billion dollars trying to embed their browser into the operating systems. The Netscape/AOL deal was $4.2 billion with companies desperate to be in control. Various players have entered and exited the field, but the war is still going strong.
Across all the companies, there have been several trillion dollars spent over the decades fighting for that control, and many companies were (and are) fighting to the death.
Again, that isn't the article. Is it really so hard to click on it and read?
They found that about 2/3 of people believe people are rich because they deserve to be rich, and the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. They are not writing about what meritocracy is, they are writing about people who believe that the world works by rewarding wealth and power from meritocracy alone, which it does not.
The covers various groups and and statistics about the people who (wrongly) believe that hard work alone will get them to be rich and powerful. Wealth and power, under that viewpoint, are due almost entirely due to one's own merits, and have little to nothing to do with external elements like luck or hereditary wealth or nepotism or other connections. Out in the real world those other factors are the primary determiners of wealth and power. Someone born into a family that is wealthy and powerful will grow up to almost certainly be wealthy and powerful; someone born into a family that is poor and powerless will grow up to almost certainly continue in poverty and powerlessness.
The article is suggesting that not only is the view false (because the world does not actually work by merits alone) but also that believing wealth and power come because the person deserves wealth and power or weakness and poverty can cause severe harm. Both extremes to wealth and poverty are harmful, both to wrongly attribute wealth and power exclusively to a wealthy person's own personal merit, and similarly the belief that the poor are in poverty and weaknesses because they have a lack of merit and therefore deserve to be poor.
While much of what you wrote is true, you clearly didn't RTFA.
A few quotes that demonstrate what they are referring to:
The most common metaphor is the “even playing field” upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit.... wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events. Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either “essential” or “very important” when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.... Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth.
Thus their conclusions and the title. If you believe the world IS driven by merit, if your own actions and efforts alone can transform you into a C-suite executive or billionaire, the result ranges from being an unrealistic optimism about work, to a self-destructive attitude, to confusion and delusion about why their hard work is not being rewarded.
The belief is also why so many people tend to be self-praising, they write about that belief, "It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses.", and when used by the poor, destroys morale and self worth.
While it is valuable to put people in charge of projects because they have a demonstrated ability to get things done, hence meritocracy, the article is declaring that the world does not work that way and many other factors like family wealth, race, luck, nepotism, and good old fashioned boot-licking are the way a large part of how the world actually works.
The story only proves that the writers used strong, loaded language. Even the headline "accidentally" is loaded meaning ignorance, "proved" is loaded as an absolute.
The article is filled with loaded, emotional, and biased terms: "punching women in the gut", "the cruel irony", "proved that women in tech can't catch a break", "tried to rationalize", "accidentally exceptionally effective", and more.
This bit of writing in the story is a real gem: But ultimately Bdeir felt that she could not explain away the show’s mistake, or blame herself, or her organization’s size, or the fact that English isn’t her first language. She could not... wait, what? How do you parse that thing? She could not blame herself? She could not explain away how she blames herself? She couldn't explain that English isn't her first language? Everything after the first "or" turns the writing into nonsense.
Hardly news, and this has been "news" in the computer world since the beginning.
This is not a new concern. People have been renting out hardware long before Amazon was invented, computer time has been rented out . Back in the 1960s and 1970s many mid-sized banks were hesitant to avoid computers not because they didn't trust or couldn't afford the machines, but because they didn't trust the companies who owned the machines or the governments where the computers were located. IBM with locations around the globe was the biggest and generally considered most trustworthy, but (looking up history online) you could rent computer access from Honeywell, Sperry Rand, Siemens, EMI, Olivetti, and others. Noting their location, that could mean you were subject to US laws, or UK laws, or Germany or France or Italy or wherever the computing center was located.
I recall discussions a decade ago asking how much we valued hosting our own data, if we were willing to sacrifice the security of controlling it versus the convenience of letting Google Docs control access to all our documents. There are companies who trust every bit of their digital data to Amazon or Google or other companies. They figure that the cost savings is a benefit, and they don't care about (or don't realize) the security implications.
There are companies that decide that maintaining control is important. For them, even if it would be cheaper or easier to lease out hardware remotely the value of maintaining control is greater than any cost savings.
It is the lay people who read headlines and ignore details who spout this nonsense. If you are trolling, please stop.
The unwashed masses want to think of planets as the biggest space rocks. But scientists organize things by various properties and characteristics. There is a dividing line between the biggest space rocks that have the properties most people think of as planets, and the smaller space rocks that are still really big but have have different properties.
If all you want in your classification of planet is "a really big space rock" is a planet, then Pluto can be a planet. It is not a scientifically useful classification, but you're not an astronomer so it doesn't matter to you. Feel free to call moons, asteroids, and comets planets as well. People through history have done that, so you wouldn't be alone.
For the astronomers, astrophysicists, and others who actually use the definitions for scientific purposes, the current classification has eight planets (sometimes called major planets), plus updated definitions for dwarf planets, minor planets, and many more classes of objects. Each one of those classifications has different properties. Pluto is classified both as a "minor planet" and a "dwarf planet". If we accepted Pluto's size and properties as a major planet, we'd need to accept about 1000 others as major planets as well. Astronomers could combine both classifications into a single class called "planets" if all they cared about was popularity rather than useful classifications, but it makes more sense to put them into their own classification bucket since they have different properties.
Under the new classification there are currently about a million "minor planets", about 22,000 of those are named. That's up from about 60,000 known minor planets in the year 2000, and about 27,000 known minor planets in 1995. The current estimate is about a billion minor planets in the solar system. Minor planets are further subdivided based on many different properties useful to astronomers and astrophysicists.
Pluto is one of an estimated 10000 large objects that fit the classification of "dwarf planets". The current list of suspected dwarf planets --- astronomers need more data to completely classify them --- is around 1000 objects.
It's all gone now. Trust is violated. Not sure how Google gets us back (if ever)
The problem is the lack of consequences for their actions.
A troll creates a channel, grabs a bunch of (infringing) videos, inserts the self-harm clips as described, and laughs as their view count increases. If they are ever discovered, their maximum consequence is having the account terminated, and they can trivially create another one.
If instead they discover there is a near-100% chance that the face child endangerment charges, child abuse charges, reckless endangerment charges, and more, it would drop. There are still some sick people who would still occasionally do it, but if they faced consequences for their actions the vast majority would stop.
Unlike the free-for-all version, the child-centric YouTube Kids failed at their promise. They claimed they were going to have carefully curated content that was age appropriate. What they should have done, in addition to actually having humans curate the content, would be to verify the others creating and updating content through background checks and validated identities. Thus anyone who wanted to post would could not do so under the shroud of anonymity, and once their harmful content was discovered it would be followed not only by an online takedown, but by officers at the door with an arrest warrant for felony crimes for each and every violator.
Go to any medical procedure from a dental filling to major surgery and you'll be required to sign away a host of rights, usually with mandatory binding arbitration and forbid a wide swath of malpractice lawsuits against everybody involved. Go buy an item and look at the legal text often shown on the receipt, or the text on a receipt directing you to the web site for the conditions of sale. Look at the 10+ pages of employment contracts usually needed to get a job, which these days nearly eliminate the ability to sue employers for things like unpaid wages or wrongful termination.
Trying to shop around doesn't help because every business incorporates them.
Go ahead and tell your doctor that you won't sign away the rights until you've negotiated a new agreement that is fair. See how well that works.
What really needs to happen is an overhaul of contract law. Currently every imaginable service has been wrapped inside contract law, and thanks to many court rulings lawyers can remove all legal protections by crafting a contract. Most protections afforded in law can be wiped away with a service contract. Nothing short of a new SCOTUS ruling or major law change could correct the issue, and there is almost no chance of those happening in the foreseeable future.
And that's how contractors win lawsuits to get full benefits.
^^^ That right there.
It tends to go in waves, where companies try to go "everybody is a contractor", followed by a wave of companies (and sometimes specific executives) facing tax fraud for misclassifying workers.
I've known some company executives who went to prison for it about eight years ago, they had a reputation for abusing their workers. The punishment was well deserved. Looking up the news article, that company owner was found personally liable for a half million dollars in restitution, six months in prison for tax fraud, and a 5-year probation with a restriction from handling money for other people. The company was sold at auction to help repay workers.
Apple has money so they could afford the lawsuit and settlement. When they've got enough money it's just a cost of doing business. But even so, stories like this mean it is time for another wave to hit.
But is that bad? I mean, I know airbus is an airplane, and the metal has joints where it comes together. I imagine millimeter tolerance is okay for an airplane?
Is that okay? Is that so small it doesn't matter? ("They bend more than that when taxiing around the airport.") Is it big enough to be a major problem? ("The wings are going to fall off!")
These alternative units of Airbusses and Tunisias are confusing.
The article used Manhattan for comparison. You use Tunisia and Airbus wings.
Don't know if I'm missing out on these metrics...
I understand that a few million Americans know how big a Manhattan would be, but really, when they say is is 2/3 of a Manhattan, my mind jumps to the size of a drink after a few sips.
Do people regularly visit Tunisia on an airbus so they are intimately familiar with those units?
This kind of warning would not even need to be a fake police sign. Even 'dangerous driving conditions ahead, slow down' could help.
They have traffic density and speed data, they could choose to identify waves of dense, dangerously fast vehicles. They certainly can detect suddenly-slowing traffic. They could probably also pick up cars weaving through traffic with so many GPS-enabled phones. All of them could trigger a shout out to pay some extra attention.
The article talks both of DWI and of other speed and safety traps.
The goal for speed enforcement is (or should be) for drivers to slow traffic down to the speed limit and drive safely. When the alerts show up, that is exactly what drivers do near the checkpoint. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, at least in that zone.
What they should be asking for is inserting extra markers when dangerous conditions are forming, so those app users can reduce traffic speeds before a crash occurs.
The Adobe argument has been rehashed for years. It is cheaper IF you were one of the few people or organizations that purchased every update.
Their rental program offers each program for about $10-$20 per month, purchased in year increments. $10 per month for Photoshop & Lightroom means $120/year. If you get the suite, it is $600 per year. With the old costs back in CS5 and CS6 days, if you purchased the near-yearly updates then it was cheaper. Few people and businesses bought upgrades that often.
Most individuals would wait for years between updates (assuming they paid for it at all, which is probably the real reason for the change). As a personal example, I went from CS3 released in 2007 to CS6 from 2012. For about $200 I used great software for five years, or about $3.33 per month versus $50 per month. True I didn't get the cutting-edge bugs, but I didn't have a need for them.
I still use CS6 from 2012 for everything except Lightroom, which I now must rent to keep up with camera file formats. That saves me about $500 each year.
It doesn't matter that the entire system could be built better using traditional databases, better by many metrics including development costs, maintenence costs, and security. This is not about the documents being used.
This is about the marketing potential. The press headlines that the masses will not understand outweigh the development costs. All the masses see is "IBM is using a magical new technology and is on the cutting edge, you can't go wrong by picking IBM." The global headlines they can cite for the next few years are easily worth $10M to IBM's global marketing groups.
Go open a job board and you'll see companies looking for blockchain programmers, blockchain data scientists, even blockchain community managers and blockchain marketing associates because those blockchains aren't going to market themselves.
That's a thing many people don't get. "No charges filed" is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
When it is he said / she said, or also in cases of male rape of he said / she said, it usually their word alone isn't enough to file charges. Even after a rape kit and when there is evidence of sex, that does not mean there is enough evidence for a conviction or even to file charges.
Unless there was a high level of violence and fighting back there tends to not be enough evidence to convict. There is a certain level that must be reached to convince the court, and usually it isn't met. Sex happened can be countered with "the other person consented at the time, this is regret not a criminal act."
But it is still critically important that reports are made, because as more reports come in, when it reaches he said / she said / she said / she said, it reaches enough evidence to convince a judge and jury. Don't remain silent if you are a victim. But also don't expect a conviction without strong evidence.
Not my BLT! Please, kind sir, be kind to my router.
I have full faith that you, an anonymous hostage-taker, will happily correct all the flaws in my BLT and release me as a digital hostage if I send the bitcoins.
The increase from gambling revenue has always been met by a corresponding decrease from state funding. The result is always zero net change to school funding rather than a windfall that proponents suggest when creating the programs.
Schools don't get any improvement due to the lottery proceedings, despite how all the lottery marketing materials tells people the lottery supports the schools.
Professional ethics are taught in many schools, but seldom practiced. Enough money will entice people willing to take it.
Many professional agencies and unions protect workers who leave jobs over ethics like that. Imagine if every Google engineer refused to work on the thing.
I'd really like to hang onto a team who are really humming for longer than that. Who know how things work, who know where everything in the code is and how its organized, who've mastered processes, who actually understand the knowledge domain we're developing software to solve so the friction between requirements and implementation is much lower...
The good news is that you as the employer absolutely can do that.
You need to figure out why people leave jobs, or more specifically, why those people you want to keep would leave their current job, and make sure those needs are satisfied. Look at the common reasons:
* People change jobs for promotions, since each level up the hierarchy has fewer openings, so make sure that people in a high-performing team all get promoted, even if that means promoting all of them as a unit.
* People change jobs for money, so make sure they're getting adequate pay increases. (Hint: if a company increases pay by an amount equal to COLA, that isn't a raise. If the company increases less than COLA, that's a year-over-year cut. If you have any say over compensation, start with COLA as a 0% wage increase, then give the raise.)
* People change jobs for more responsibility. Make sure that a well-oiled team has the option to gain additional responsibilities over time.
* Some people hate monotony. Some people love monotony. Find out what the person likes, and give them that.
* Some people hate change. Some people love change. Find out what the person likes, and give them that.
* Many other reasons. Ask them, and give them what they need to be thrilled to keep you as their boss.
Make sure the workers feel they have the power to do the job, that they are happy in the job, and that they are well rewarded for doing it. Check in frequently (e.g. weekly) and make sure it remains that way.
If you want them to be loyal to you as the employer, be loyal to them. For most jobs, both the employer and employee are loyal all the way through pay day. If you want more loyalty than that, as the employer you must be the first to offer it. Otherwise, someone else will be thrilled to be their boss, and give them what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
He's not a US citizen. In the 1990s he was convicted of some computer crimes in Australia (where he is from) but he served his time.
When this started there were accusations of rape, which is a crime most of the world is willing to extradite for. To rape someone you actually need to be there. But now there are charges for what, and where was he?
If he were a US citizen being charged for violating US law while abroad, I could understand the extradition. But here, he's an Australian citizen being extradited for so far unspecified crimes committed against a country he apparently wasn't in and isn't a citizen of.
Imagine if the US turned over to China everybody who spoke ill of the Chinese government, or shipped off to North Korea the people who released documents that North Korea deemed offensive. Unless there are some other charges, that's what I see as the equivalent. From what I've read, his only ties to the US are that he offended politicians there, and published documents the government (which was a foreign government for him) didn't want published.
Not all game developers are game programmers. Artists, animators, designers, audio engineers, they're all game developers, too. Many statistics that talk about game developers could be better broken out by discipline. Programmers are the highest paid of all the game development disciplines, and at senior levels they're comparable to other fields. I don't mean the trend of "senior" being applied to someone with three years experience, I'm referring to people with a decade or more of work experience working at established companies.
At the junior levels --- where there is more supply than demand and many young eager applicants are willing to work for exploitative companies --- programmers are often paid less than similar industries. There are many bad companies who churn-and-burn. This means a large number of junior developers have bad experiences because those abusive companies churn through so many.
At senior levels --- where demand is greater than supply and workers are generally savvy enough to not be exploited by the abusive companies --- pay rates are good. They're not investment banker or well funded Internet Startup good, but on par with programmers in many other industries.
The good companies that pay well also tend to grow slowly and have low turnover, meaning people are secure in their higher paying jobs, but the openings are less common (because of the low turnover) so they are less visible.
The "six figures" comments others are making are location specific and misleading. $100K in Silicon Valley is not a living wage. $100K in Des Moines is high. £100K in Yorkshire is an amazing rate.
The pronounciation seems to fit the language just fine.
But as the story points out, sometimes there is unintended harm.
It is potentially a major issue when these "undocumented features" show up elsewhere. There were several fun "undocumented features" like the excel flight simulator, and the names of volcanoes in the Microsoft screen saver. But for some organizations, like military organizations that rely on the software, undocumented features are a security nightmare.
TL;DR: Funny animation on home computer is good. Funny animation on hospital emergency room computer or nuclear submarine control system is bad. The computer doesn't know the difference.
I remember the old fantasy that the Web would be the next operating system. Nobody really thought all that much about who would end up in control of that operating system.
"Nobody really thought about it" really means you didn't think about it.
Lots of people thought about it. During the Browser Wars of Netscape v Microsoft starting in late 1995, control over who owns the future was discussed all the time. Companies spent untold billion dollars fighting for that control. Microsoft spent several billion dollars trying to embed their browser into the operating systems. The Netscape/AOL deal was $4.2 billion with companies desperate to be in control. Various players have entered and exited the field, but the war is still going strong.
Across all the companies, there have been several trillion dollars spent over the decades fighting for that control, and many companies were (and are) fighting to the death.
Again, that isn't the article. Is it really so hard to click on it and read?
They found that about 2/3 of people believe people are rich because they deserve to be rich, and the poor are poor because they deserve to be poor. They are not writing about what meritocracy is, they are writing about people who believe that the world works by rewarding wealth and power from meritocracy alone, which it does not.
The covers various groups and and statistics about the people who (wrongly) believe that hard work alone will get them to be rich and powerful. Wealth and power, under that viewpoint, are due almost entirely due to one's own merits, and have little to nothing to do with external elements like luck or hereditary wealth or nepotism or other connections. Out in the real world those other factors are the primary determiners of wealth and power. Someone born into a family that is wealthy and powerful will grow up to almost certainly be wealthy and powerful; someone born into a family that is poor and powerless will grow up to almost certainly continue in poverty and powerlessness.
The article is suggesting that not only is the view false (because the world does not actually work by merits alone) but also that believing wealth and power come because the person deserves wealth and power or weakness and poverty can cause severe harm. Both extremes to wealth and poverty are harmful, both to wrongly attribute wealth and power exclusively to a wealthy person's own personal merit, and similarly the belief that the poor are in poverty and weaknesses because they have a lack of merit and therefore deserve to be poor.
While much of what you wrote is true, you clearly didn't RTFA.
A few quotes that demonstrate what they are referring to:
The most common metaphor is the “even playing field” upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. ... wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events. Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the U.K., 84% of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either “essential” or “very important” when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69% of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe. ... Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth.
Thus their conclusions and the title. If you believe the world IS driven by merit, if your own actions and efforts alone can transform you into a C-suite executive or billionaire, the result ranges from being an unrealistic optimism about work, to a self-destructive attitude, to confusion and delusion about why their hard work is not being rewarded.
The belief is also why so many people tend to be self-praising, they write about that belief, "It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses.", and when used by the poor, destroys morale and self worth.
While it is valuable to put people in charge of projects because they have a demonstrated ability to get things done, hence meritocracy, the article is declaring that the world does not work that way and many other factors like family wealth, race, luck, nepotism, and good old fashioned boot-licking are the way a large part of how the world actually works.
No, it doesn't prove anything
The story only proves that the writers used strong, loaded language. Even the headline "accidentally" is loaded meaning ignorance, "proved" is loaded as an absolute.
The article is filled with loaded, emotional, and biased terms: "punching women in the gut", "the cruel irony", "proved that women in tech can't catch a break", "tried to rationalize", "accidentally exceptionally effective", and more.
This bit of writing in the story is a real gem: But ultimately Bdeir felt that she could not explain away the show’s mistake, or blame herself, or her organization’s size, or the fact that English isn’t her first language. She could not ... wait, what? How do you parse that thing? She could not blame herself? She could not explain away how she blames herself? She couldn't explain that English isn't her first language? Everything after the first "or" turns the writing into nonsense.
Hardly news, and this has been "news" in the computer world since the beginning.
This is not a new concern. People have been renting out hardware long before Amazon was invented, computer time has been rented out . Back in the 1960s and 1970s many mid-sized banks were hesitant to avoid computers not because they didn't trust or couldn't afford the machines, but because they didn't trust the companies who owned the machines or the governments where the computers were located. IBM with locations around the globe was the biggest and generally considered most trustworthy, but (looking up history online) you could rent computer access from Honeywell, Sperry Rand, Siemens, EMI, Olivetti, and others. Noting their location, that could mean you were subject to US laws, or UK laws, or Germany or France or Italy or wherever the computing center was located.
I recall discussions a decade ago asking how much we valued hosting our own data, if we were willing to sacrifice the security of controlling it versus the convenience of letting Google Docs control access to all our documents. There are companies who trust every bit of their digital data to Amazon or Google or other companies. They figure that the cost savings is a benefit, and they don't care about (or don't realize) the security implications.
There are companies that decide that maintaining control is important. For them, even if it would be cheaper or easier to lease out hardware remotely the value of maintaining control is greater than any cost savings.
If Pluto isn't a planet, then neither is Earth
It is the lay people who read headlines and ignore details who spout this nonsense. If you are trolling, please stop.
The unwashed masses want to think of planets as the biggest space rocks. But scientists organize things by various properties and characteristics. There is a dividing line between the biggest space rocks that have the properties most people think of as planets, and the smaller space rocks that are still really big but have have different properties.
If all you want in your classification of planet is "a really big space rock" is a planet, then Pluto can be a planet. It is not a scientifically useful classification, but you're not an astronomer so it doesn't matter to you. Feel free to call moons, asteroids, and comets planets as well. People through history have done that, so you wouldn't be alone.
For the astronomers, astrophysicists, and others who actually use the definitions for scientific purposes, the current classification has eight planets (sometimes called major planets), plus updated definitions for dwarf planets, minor planets, and many more classes of objects. Each one of those classifications has different properties. Pluto is classified both as a "minor planet" and a "dwarf planet". If we accepted Pluto's size and properties as a major planet, we'd need to accept about 1000 others as major planets as well. Astronomers could combine both classifications into a single class called "planets" if all they cared about was popularity rather than useful classifications, but it makes more sense to put them into their own classification bucket since they have different properties.
Under the new classification there are currently about a million "minor planets", about 22,000 of those are named. That's up from about 60,000 known minor planets in the year 2000, and about 27,000 known minor planets in 1995. The current estimate is about a billion minor planets in the solar system. Minor planets are further subdivided based on many different properties useful to astronomers and astrophysicists.
Pluto is one of an estimated 10000 large objects that fit the classification of "dwarf planets". The current list of suspected dwarf planets --- astronomers need more data to completely classify them --- is around 1000 objects.
It's all gone now. Trust is violated. Not sure how Google gets us back (if ever)
The problem is the lack of consequences for their actions.
A troll creates a channel, grabs a bunch of (infringing) videos, inserts the self-harm clips as described, and laughs as their view count increases. If they are ever discovered, their maximum consequence is having the account terminated, and they can trivially create another one.
If instead they discover there is a near-100% chance that the face child endangerment charges, child abuse charges, reckless endangerment charges, and more, it would drop. There are still some sick people who would still occasionally do it, but if they faced consequences for their actions the vast majority would stop.
Unlike the free-for-all version, the child-centric YouTube Kids failed at their promise. They claimed they were going to have carefully curated content that was age appropriate. What they should have done, in addition to actually having humans curate the content, would be to verify the others creating and updating content through background checks and validated identities. Thus anyone who wanted to post would could not do so under the shroud of anonymity, and once their harmful content was discovered it would be followed not only by an online takedown, but by officers at the door with an arrest warrant for felony crimes for each and every violator.
It isn't unique to web sites.
Go to any medical procedure from a dental filling to major surgery and you'll be required to sign away a host of rights, usually with mandatory binding arbitration and forbid a wide swath of malpractice lawsuits against everybody involved. Go buy an item and look at the legal text often shown on the receipt, or the text on a receipt directing you to the web site for the conditions of sale. Look at the 10+ pages of employment contracts usually needed to get a job, which these days nearly eliminate the ability to sue employers for things like unpaid wages or wrongful termination.
Trying to shop around doesn't help because every business incorporates them.
Go ahead and tell your doctor that you won't sign away the rights until you've negotiated a new agreement that is fair. See how well that works.
What really needs to happen is an overhaul of contract law. Currently every imaginable service has been wrapped inside contract law, and thanks to many court rulings lawyers can remove all legal protections by crafting a contract. Most protections afforded in law can be wiped away with a service contract. Nothing short of a new SCOTUS ruling or major law change could correct the issue, and there is almost no chance of those happening in the foreseeable future.
And that's how contractors win lawsuits to get full benefits.
^^^ That right there.
It tends to go in waves, where companies try to go "everybody is a contractor", followed by a wave of companies (and sometimes specific executives) facing tax fraud for misclassifying workers.
I've known some company executives who went to prison for it about eight years ago, they had a reputation for abusing their workers. The punishment was well deserved. Looking up the news article, that company owner was found personally liable for a half million dollars in restitution, six months in prison for tax fraud, and a 5-year probation with a restriction from handling money for other people. The company was sold at auction to help repay workers.
Apple has money so they could afford the lawsuit and settlement. When they've got enough money it's just a cost of doing business. But even so, stories like this mean it is time for another wave to hit.
But is that bad? I mean, I know airbus is an airplane, and the metal has joints where it comes together. I imagine millimeter tolerance is okay for an airplane?
Is that okay? Is that so small it doesn't matter? ("They bend more than that when taxiing around the airport.") Is it big enough to be a major problem? ("The wings are going to fall off!")
These alternative units of Airbusses and Tunisias are confusing.
The article used Manhattan for comparison. You use Tunisia and Airbus wings.
Don't know if I'm missing out on these metrics...
I understand that a few million Americans know how big a Manhattan would be, but really, when they say is is 2/3 of a Manhattan, my mind jumps to the size of a drink after a few sips.
Do people regularly visit Tunisia on an airbus so they are intimately familiar with those units?
This kind of warning would not even need to be a fake police sign. Even 'dangerous driving conditions ahead, slow down' could help.
They have traffic density and speed data, they could choose to identify waves of dense, dangerously fast vehicles. They certainly can detect suddenly-slowing traffic. They could probably also pick up cars weaving through traffic with so many GPS-enabled phones. All of them could trigger a shout out to pay some extra attention.
The article talks both of DWI and of other speed and safety traps.
The goal for speed enforcement is (or should be) for drivers to slow traffic down to the speed limit and drive safely. When the alerts show up, that is exactly what drivers do near the checkpoint. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, at least in that zone.
What they should be asking for is inserting extra markers when dangerous conditions are forming, so those app users can reduce traffic speeds before a crash occurs.
The Adobe argument has been rehashed for years. It is cheaper IF you were one of the few people or organizations that purchased every update.
Their rental program offers each program for about $10-$20 per month, purchased in year increments. $10 per month for Photoshop & Lightroom means $120/year. If you get the suite, it is $600 per year. With the old costs back in CS5 and CS6 days, if you purchased the near-yearly updates then it was cheaper. Few people and businesses bought upgrades that often.
Most individuals would wait for years between updates (assuming they paid for it at all, which is probably the real reason for the change). As a personal example, I went from CS3 released in 2007 to CS6 from 2012. For about $200 I used great software for five years, or about $3.33 per month versus $50 per month. True I didn't get the cutting-edge bugs, but I didn't have a need for them.
I still use CS6 from 2012 for everything except Lightroom, which I now must rent to keep up with camera file formats. That saves me about $500 each year.
Isn't this just an electronic document?
Yes, but no. This is a golden marketing moment.
It doesn't matter that the entire system could be built better using traditional databases, better by many metrics including development costs, maintenence costs, and security. This is not about the documents being used.
This is about the marketing potential. The press headlines that the masses will not understand outweigh the development costs. All the masses see is "IBM is using a magical new technology and is on the cutting edge, you can't go wrong by picking IBM." The global headlines they can cite for the next few years are easily worth $10M to IBM's global marketing groups.
It's all about the blockchain these days.
Go open a job board and you'll see companies looking for blockchain programmers, blockchain data scientists, even blockchain community managers and blockchain marketing associates because those blockchains aren't going to market themselves.
Browsing few, I even see a listing for a blockchain blogging expert. That's a real job, apparently. Somehow.
Everything is better with Blockchain. ;-)
That's a thing many people don't get. "No charges filed" is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
When it is he said / she said, or also in cases of male rape of he said / she said, it usually their word alone isn't enough to file charges. Even after a rape kit and when there is evidence of sex, that does not mean there is enough evidence for a conviction or even to file charges.
Unless there was a high level of violence and fighting back there tends to not be enough evidence to convict. There is a certain level that must be reached to convince the court, and usually it isn't met. Sex happened can be countered with "the other person consented at the time, this is regret not a criminal act."
But it is still critically important that reports are made, because as more reports come in, when it reaches he said / she said / she said / she said, it reaches enough evidence to convince a judge and jury. Don't remain silent if you are a victim. But also don't expect a conviction without strong evidence.
Not my BLT! Please, kind sir, be kind to my router.
I have full faith that you, an anonymous hostage-taker, will happily correct all the flaws in my BLT and release me as a digital hostage if I send the bitcoins.
lottery proceeds going to fund schools.
There is fleecing going on there, too.
The increase from gambling revenue has always been met by a corresponding decrease from state funding. The result is always zero net change to school funding rather than a windfall that proponents suggest when creating the programs.
Schools don't get any improvement due to the lottery proceedings, despite how all the lottery marketing materials tells people the lottery supports the schools.
Professional ethics are taught in many schools, but seldom practiced. Enough money will entice people willing to take it.
Many professional agencies and unions protect workers who leave jobs over ethics like that. Imagine if every Google engineer refused to work on the thing.
I'd really like to hang onto a team who are really humming for longer than that. Who know how things work, who know where everything in the code is and how its organized, who've mastered processes, who actually understand the knowledge domain we're developing software to solve so the friction between requirements and implementation is much lower...
The good news is that you as the employer absolutely can do that.
You need to figure out why people leave jobs, or more specifically, why those people you want to keep would leave their current job, and make sure those needs are satisfied. Look at the common reasons:
Make sure the workers feel they have the power to do the job, that they are happy in the job, and that they are well rewarded for doing it. Check in frequently (e.g. weekly) and make sure it remains that way.
If you want them to be loyal to you as the employer, be loyal to them. For most jobs, both the employer and employee are loyal all the way through pay day. If you want more loyalty than that, as the employer you must be the first to offer it. Otherwise, someone else will be thrilled to be their boss, and give them what they want.